‘How functional is the Eurozone? An index of European economic integration through the single currency’

This is the title of the paper I have just written with my good friend and colleague, Professor Pedro Schwartz (Camilo Jose Cela University in Madrid and University of Buckingham), which will be published in Economic Affairs(October issue, 2017).

We deal with a quite straight forward question: How can we measure the optimality of a currency area? When does it become more and more difficult to run a single monetary policy? If there are internal asymmetries in the currency area, how do they evolve? To answer, if only tentatively, these questions we have developed the method to calculate the index of optimality of a currency area, which we have split up in four major categories and components: (1) fiscal synchronicity, (2) public finance, (3) competitiveness and (4) monetary. Both the overall index and the above partial indices will inform us about the performance of the currency union and how internal asymmetries have increased or decreased. We have applied it to the eurozone, from 1999 to 2016. The results and calculations give us a metric to identify the building up of internal tensions in the running of the single monetary policy since the inception of the euro in 1999.

If only a chart, this is the summary of what we found in our research; in a nutshell, the adoption of the euro has not increased convergence among eurozone economies. The overall index of dispersion increased by 25% from 1999 to 2005 (see figure below), and so asymmetries amongst member states even during an expansionary cycle. Of course, as expected, internal dispersion soared during and immediately after the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis. This increase in dispersion in the crisis years ‘s not a symptom of the malfunction of the euro; what we should rather focus on is on the time taken for asymmetries to resume pre-crisis levels. Overall, even after 10 year since the start of the recent crisis, the optimality index still shows the Eurozone has a long way ahead to resume pre-2007 crisis levels (such as 1999 levels, when even countries joining the Eurozone were far from convergence).

This is the abstract of the paper:

‘This is a step in empirically assessing how near the Eurozone is to becoming an ‘optimal currency area’, as originally defined by Mundell (1961). For this purpose we have compiled ten indicators, organised them in four chapters, and summarised them in an overall indicator of ‘optimality’. The resulting picture is mixed, with zone optimality not increasing when circumstances were favourable but the trend towards integration returning after the 2008-2014 crisis. The suggestion is that dis-integration during the crisis, rather than an evidence of failure of the Eurozone when the going was tough, showed a self-healing mechanism at work. However our measurements and indices show that optimality is much lower than that in 1999.’